The “doorman fallacy” argues that decisions should be made on cost and efficiency alone. If a doorman’s job is defined purely as “opens the door,” then an automatic door looks like a perfect replacement. But the moment you remove the person, you lose everything that wasn’t captured in that definition: the sense of safety, the deterrent to troublemakers, the help with bags, the local advice, the warm welcome. All the things that are hard to measure but impossible to ignore once they are gone.
Software engineering often gets viewed the same way. If you reduce the role to “produces code,” then the logical conclusion is that more code, faster, is the ultimate goal. And with AI now able to generate code at incredible speed, it is easy to assume engineers are slowly being automated away.
But that view misses the real work entirely. Good engineering lives in the invisible parts:
- Turning user and client needs into clear requirements and realistic estimates
- Designing scalable, reliable systems and choosing the right tools
- Ensuring quality through reviews, testing, debugging, and performance improvements
- Deploying and maintaining the infrastructure everything depends on
All of this has to be done while working with people who often are not fully sure what they need yet, and helping them figure it out.
So the idea that software engineers can be swapped out for automatic doors does not hold up. The value is not in typing speed. It is in the thinking, the judgement, the understanding, and the responsibility for making sure things actually work.
If you are planning a new system, or advising someone who is, BitSphere brings the engineering experience that keeps things stable, secure, and built to last. Contact us to discuss your project.
Photo: “Hotel Doormen in London” by Garry Knight, CC BY-SA 2.0 (via Wikimedia Commons)